Raise Your Endorphins: Chicago Trip 2015

Mark's job at Durham, Jones and Pinegar, keeps him in Salt Lake City most of the time. But every so often he has to attend a conference or retreat away from home base. One of those "every-so's" came along in the form of an American Bar Association conference in the Windy City (which we were informed was named so because of it's resident's propensity for bragging about their home, not because of the weather). Usually when I go on a business trip with Mark, I relish the thought of sitting in a quiet hotel room, reading a mind-candy book, but Chicago drew me out of my room and treated me to new sights and awareness.

I've been told that a sure way to spot a tourist in a big city is if she is looking up while walking instead of forward. I must have been easy to spot. The amount of skyscrapers in Chicago certainly put Salt Lake City to shame. We stayed in a hotel on The Magnificent Mile, a very touristy and swanky mile on Michigan Avenue full of high end stores, museums, chocolatiers and Walgreens, two or three of them, which is fitting since Chicago is it's birthplace.

I took the opportunity, being husband and child-less for the moment, to walk to the Are Institute of Chicago. Along the way, I stopped at Millennial Park and enjoyed the outdoor theater, in the above picture, which stands below the silver sculpted forms.

There is also the famous bean, which is officially named "Cloud Gate," which was formed and built to reflect everything around it in new perspective. You can try to find me, I'm even wearing a striped shirt, ala Waldo, but you can't see me well. But from the perspective you can probably figure out where I am.

I took a picture of these three statues because they reminded me of my three boys. They are wide at this angle, but when you walk to the West, they are thin, which is where I discovered these three heads belong to girls, not boys. Sorry, my sons.

I really love trees. This tree is in the garden on the Art Institute, but this picture doesn't do it justice. It is a far reaching, low hanging on one side, growing to it's height on the other and must be very old. I always wonder what things old trees like this have seen.

I spent about 5 hours in the Art Institute, trying to see everything I could, but I didn't get to everything. The first exhibits I saw were glass paper weights, which despite it's mundane sound were quite transfixing, and also a hall full of tiny rooms with tiny furniture like the one above.

I was impressed to find a page of the Guttenburg Bible!

Spencer warned us to be careful about not falling in with gangs and thugs. I couldn't help it in this Asian exhibit.

One of my favorite artists is Monet. Even after humanities classes in college, I do not consider myself proficient in art and cannot speak well with artistic terms, but it seems to me that there is movement in Monet's pieces, even the haystack ones. But the piece above really did seem to move as I walked back from it and from side to side. I think his paintings are peaceful.

This one is a Picasso, and is not peaceful, but I can respect it all the same for what it does represent, which is a double life. There are some pieces that I viewed that I tried to respect, if just for the sake of art, but to this home town girl, I just couldn't even squeak out reasons for some of them to be hanging in an art museum. As it seems that some of the art is produced just to breed controversy, I hope that the artist will respect my perspective on their "art," or what I might deem at non-art, which just seems all jumbled, but then that could be artistic too, right? Right, that's about how confused I felt at seeing some of the art there!

The vase was dated at 320 B.C.!!!

The Chagall windows were very impressive! They were among the few pieces that were featured in the high brow film, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

The real reason I went to the museum is to take a picture with these two. American Gothic, is a painting of a farmer and his daughter, representing standing for Midwestern traditions and culture. It looks like they are sitting on my shoulder as I give my best gothic face. I could've been a little more down in the mouth, I guess.

The next day, Mark joined me in walking through some of the downtown area and we were interested to find pieces of other buildings built into the The New York Times building. The pieces above include an ancient temple in China and a piece of Notre Dame. We partook of Chicago's famous Garrett's caramel popcorn and Giordano's deep dish pizza, which kept us full for 7 hours of walking.

This trip solidified the fact that we are getting old, in three ways: 1. The weekend we were there happened to be the weekend of the NFL draft, which was held in Millennial Park, and instead of going to check it out, we decided to avoid the crowds. 2. We walked to Navy Pier, where there were shops and a ferris wheel, but we decided to avoid the shops and rides and just enjoy the water and the pier. 3. We took an architecture tour on the Chicago River and thought it very interesting. An architecture tour. We just felt old as we walked around in our orthodic shoes.

But really, the tour was very interesting, with out tour guide spouting history and architectural terms that enlightened us to a different form of art.

After a delicious dinner of sushi, on top of the remains of Giordano's pizza, this is as close as I could or would get to a giant chocolate bar. That and the fact that it was $50.00.

On Sunday, we rented a car and took off for Sycamore, an hour West of Chicago, to visit Elford's grave site. For some reason that picture didn't download, but I promise you we were there and we left some flowers in his memory. We also did some searching for other Astling family members and found them to be at the opposite end of the cemetery as Elford and his parents.